Ruby Hamad > Quotes

“White women can oscillate between their gender and their race, between being the oppressed and the oppressor. Women of color are never permitted to exist outside of these constraints: we are both women and people of color and we are always seen and treated as such.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“Women of color are rarely given the benefit of the doubt and even more rarely considered worthy of sympathy and support. If we are angry it is because we are bullies, if we are crying it is because we are indulging in the cult of victimhood, if we are poised it is because we lack emotion, if we are emotional it is because we are less rational human and more primitive animal.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“Women of color have to not only battle white patriarchy and that of their own culture, but must also contend with colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, and other forms of racism. Given white women have never had to deal with racial and colonial oppression, it is not surprising — though it is certainly regrettable — that so many of them still regard feminism as a movement purely concerned with gender, leaving racialized women to keep trying to draw their attention to the ways in which various oppressions affect our lives. Until white women reckon with this, mainstream Western feminism cannot be anything more than another iteration of white supremacy.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“White women’s tears are fundamental to the success of whiteness. Their distress is a weapon that prevents people of color from being able to assert themselves or to effectively challenge white racism and alter the fundamental inequalities built into the system.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“Those tears may well be genuine, but that does not make them innocent and harmless: the opposite in fact.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“Arab women came to be seen as they are largely seen today: sexually repressed, frigid, virginal, burdened by virtue, shame, and family honor, and more or less silenced—ironically, pretty much the things that supposedly made white women so special for so long.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“This weaponization of White Womanhood continues to be the centerpiece of an arsenal used to maintain the status quo and punish anyone who dares challenge it.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“Trying to reason with whiteness is akin to reasoning with a clinical narcissist who refuses to go to therapy: frustratingly impossible because the untreated narcissist simply does not have the requisite tools to see themselves as anything other than “good,”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“And so “white damsel” as an archetype was one of racial purity, Christian morality, sexual innocence, demureness, and financial dependence on men all rolled into one. A privilege, yes, but a perilous one, for to step off this pedestal meant no longer being regarded as a “woman.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“This is how whiteness reasserts itself: through a white feminist movement that aligns itself with diversity and inclusion to get white women through the door but then slams it shut in brown and black women’s faces.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“A white woman may well be punished for an emotional outburst when interacting with men, but if she is engaged in a terse interaction with a woman of color and she becomes emotional, by which I mean either angry or distraught, with or without actual tears, the deeply embedded notions of gender and femininity are triggered and it is the white woman who is likely to be vindicated.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“White feminists have to do what they expect of men: to separate the act from the person and look at racism as they look at sexism, as a structural problem that can only begin to be solved when they stop putting their hurt feelings ahead of our material harm. It is not enough for white women to have their hearts in the right place or to claim they don’t see color and treat everyone equally. Feminism must commit to an explicitly anti-racist platform. And that means severing themselves from their historical and emotional attachment to inherent innocence and goodness.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“What does it mean for the rest of us that white women can quietly control almost all of the weapons belonging to the world’s most powerful country and still claim to be oppressed in the same way as other women?”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“This has created a highly skewed perception of Arab women that relegates us to what I call “Pets or Threats”: we are positioned as helpless, repressed victims without agency or a voice worth listening to, desperately in need of a white savior to rescue us from the clutches of our Bad Arab kin; or we are Bad Arabs ourselves, threats that must be contained and kept in our place. If we are not one, we must be the other.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“Classwashing is an attempt to absolve and deny the existence of racism at all strata of society by turning the tables to admonish people of color that it is unfair to talk about racism at the polling booth because the white working class is disenfranchised. Or they are uneducated. Or they just don’t know any better. We need to hear them out and then we will see their racism will dissolve as soon as their economic”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“There is no sisterhood. How can there be, when white supremacy has done such a thorough job of setting White Womanhood apart from the rest of us? There’s a division, all right, but it is not caused by us. Yes,”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“For centuries, the West has regurgitated representations of colonized women that came to be accepted as more real than the real. Jezebels. Black velvet. Harem girls. China Dolls. Princess Pocahontas. All of these reduced complex human beings to cardboard cutout sexual objects without agency and whose surrendered sexuality was de facto justification for white supremacy.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“For all the “I’m With Her” and “The Future Is Female” high-fiving floating around, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that merely having more white women in powerful positions isn’t going to result in a more just and equitable world. This reality continues to be glossed over by the rhetoric of “empowerment” and “lean-in” corporate feminism.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“Yes, it is true women of color have been the targets of a setup of monumental proportions, something that amounts to nothing short of a covert war against us. But it is also true that these attacks are their own proof of just how serious a threat to the status quo all women of color really are. So serious, in fact, that the very concept of the innocent white woman was constructed to keep us firmly in our place.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“People are fond of describing forward-thinking people as “ahead of their time.” This is a mischaracterization that fuels a false belief in an inherently linear social progress where positive change is inevitable... No one is really ahead of their time. If anything, such people are exactly of their time because they have the capacity to diagnose the maladies of their era and prescribe the remedies. The problem is just how stubbornly resistant to this medicine the rest of us are: it’s not merely that we are behind them, it’s that we all too often resent those bold thinkers for what they tell us about our society and ourselves. And our response is to either ignore or silence them.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“The Taliban emerged from former U.S. allies the mujahideen (“holy warriors”), who were partly funded by the United States in order to counter the Soviet invasion in 1979. There is a Western tendency to view Islamist extremism as intrinsic to Islam and as popular among Muslims, but groups such as the Taliban enjoyed only very minimal support from the Afghan population before the war against the Soviets.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“The younger cousin of the Angry Black Woman, the Angry Brown Woman is not critical: she is vitriolic. She does not disagree: she attacks. She is not confident: she is aggressive. She is not assertive: she is scary. She is, by sheer virtue of her inherent nature, permanently, well, angry—not because of anything that has been done to her, mind you, but simply because that is what she is.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“The fear of Black Peril—the name whites gave to the specter of black male sexual desire for white women—was so wildly disproportionate to the actual threat that historians now regard it as a kind of psychopathology.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“Feminism is not immune to this. For should we fail to keep up our end of the unspoken bargain, should we tug at the invisible leash that whiteness and white feminism have secured around our necks, then that solidarity is revoked and White Womanhood ensures it is always us, and never them, who pay the price for speaking out. Turns out, they too saw us as threats all along.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“You stay in your place, and I stay in mine, then I get to claim you as my friend, you’re my coworker, see how I’m not racist? But [only] as long as you don’t challenge my identity and my position.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“The existence of a binary means that one pole in the structure is almost always going to dominate. It is better to be a man than it is to be a woman, and if one must be a woman then it is far better to be a virgin than a whore. It is better to be from the West than the East and white is better than black, but if you can’t be white then it is better to be as close to white as you can.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“In a similar vein, bell hooks notes that although white American men in that era appeared to revere the virtue of white women, they didn’t seem to like them very much. In other words: it’s all a performance, a façade. But it is a façade that white women have insisted on sustaining, to their own detriment as well as ours.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“When broader society refuses to validate women of color, it becomes vital for us to share our experiences with each other as a means of coping with these damaging stereotypes and archetypes, and to help us recognize the gaslighting techniques and stereotypes that keep us in a subordinate position.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“Again, we are talking about a woman with Palestinian heritage expected to show deference, if not all-out reverence, to a politician who has shown little concern for her people simply because that politician is a (white) liberal woman. Predictably, Tlaib was hounded online and off until she apologized. Never mind that her own actions came after months of Clinton injecting herself into the 2020 campaign by repeatedly taking swipes at Sanders.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“This image has so dominated Western views of Southeast Asian women that it became a key driver of Thailand’s sex industry. Sex tours of Southeast Asia remain hugely popular among white men, which ensures that the distorted image of Asian women persists.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color